Brazil in Yet Another End-of-the-World Election

In 2022, on the eve of Brazil’s last presidential election, Brazil’s leading radical publisher Boitempo brought together sociologist Silvia Viana and philosopher Paulo Arantes for a discussion titled “End-of-the-World Elections”. Viana opened by explaining that the title was meant to capture the “shock” experienced by part of the progressive left after the first round of the 2022 election, as Jair Bolsonaro and the right performed far better than expected.

Four years later, the Brazilian left appears, once again, to be confronting the prospect of “the end of the world.” It is as though we were suddenly passing from representative democracy to apocalyptic democracy. In a presidential contest that, until October 4, many commentators had described as the least interesting since Brazil returned to democratic rule in 1985, unable to galvanize voters on either side, the first-round victory of far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro—the son of the former president, convicted and imprisoned for an attempted coup d’état near the end of his term—left many progressive voters in shock: he received 47.03% of the vote to president Luiz Inácio da Silva better known as Lula.

During the week before the vote, most polls pointed to a victory for the incumbent, Lula Luiz, albeit by a narrow margin. On the eve of the election, there was even talk that he might settle the matter in the first round. For a moment, early in the count, that seemed as though it might indeed happen—except that, to the left’s dismay, it looked as if Flávio Bolsonaro might be the one to clinch it.

The fact is that, in an election marked by record abstention, the far right—though much quieter than in previous elections, when Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters dominated the streets in weekly demonstrations filled with people wearing Brazilian national soccer-team jerseys—seems to have managed to keep its supporters engaged. Or at least that was one impression left by the results, given an abstention rate that appears to have disproportionately affected poorer voters, a constituency traditionally closer to the Workers’ Party. In a close election in which two candidates won more than 90 percent of the vote between them, this difference in the ability to get voters to show up at polls, combined with the late concentration of right-wing votes around Flávio Bolsonaro, may help explain his lead at the ballot box.

At first, the progressive left was overcome by bewilderment. For many, it was impossible to imagine how an iconic figure like Lula, with all the resources that the machinery of government generally places at an incumbent’s disposal during a presidential reelection campaign, could have fallen behind the uncharismatic oldest son of Jair Bolsonaro, the man his supporters call the mito—the “legend”. For many Lula voters—and, I suspect, for a significant share of the Workers’ Party (PT) campaign strategists as well—the contrast between Bolsonaro’s government (elected in 2018) and Lula’s (elected in 2022) was simply too obvious. Under Lula, after all, the economy had improved, inflation and unemployment had fallen, social programs had been restored, and others newly created, while income taxes had been reduced for those at the bottom income scale. It was as if the campaign had bet everything on the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid,” as though the government’s economic achievements would, in themselves, be enough to secure victory. But they were not.

The question many began asking, then, was: why? And, at a deeper level, why had that approach failed against Flávio Bolsonaro, of all people? Many regarded him as the most tarnished of Jair Bolsonaro’s sons: the one most frequently mentioned in corruption scandals; the one with the closest connections to organized crime—especially Rio de Janeiro’s militias; the one whose friendship with banker Daniel Vorcaro—perhaps one of the most sinister figures to emerge on Brazil’s political scene in recent years, stands at the center of one of the country’s largest political and financial scandals (some commentators have even dubbed him “Brazil’s Jeffrey Epstein,” drawing parallels between the webs of money, power, and influence surrounding the two men)—was apparently particularly close.

Many hypotheses emerged in an effort to answer these questions. Particular emphasis was placed on US interference in the elections and Donald Trump’s overt interest in a Flávio Bolsonaro victory, interpreted by many as part of a broader strategy to reinforce US hegemony over the South American continent.

Another widely discussed factor was the interest of American Big Tech companies, especially after evidence emerged that Meta—Mark Zuckerberg’s company, which owns Brazil’s most widely used messaging app, WhatsApp, as well as two enormously influential social networks, Instagram and Facebook—was amplifying the circulation of Flávio Bolsonaro’s content while making life harder for Lula’s supporters; Nikolas Ferreira, a young evangelical Congressman for Minas Gerais, had more views on Instagram [Bf4] than Kim Kardashian and Leonel Messi during the election campaign, despite having a fraction of their followers. This last hypothesis dovetailed with another, hardly new: that the far right had come to dominate social media and had learned to use it masterfully to manipulate the population through moral panic and fake news.

What was new, however, was the way the far right appeared to find support within the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), presided over by Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, whom Jair Bolsonaro had appointed to the Supreme Federal Court (STF). The increasing resort to litigation during the campaign became an important tool for Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign. This was undoubtedly facilitated by the institutional crisis engulfing the Supreme Court, amid scandals connecting several of its justices to the aforementioned banker Daniel Vorcaro. During this runoff campaign, the name of the TSE president appeared in messages from the banker, recovered from a device seized by the Federal Police and disclosed by the press, prompting suspicions about possible favors offered to the justice. Other journalistic investigations linked Vorcaro to possible international prostitution networks involving women being allegedly trafficked from Ukraine.

The problem, as we shall see, is not that these explanations are necessarily false. There is evidence of foreign interference, systematic disinformation campaigns, and questionable practices by digital platforms. But there is a considerable distance between demonstrating the existence of such mechanisms and attributing to them, on their own, the power to explain the choices made by millions of voters. It may be precisely in that distance that one of the progressive left’s greatest difficulties in understanding Bolsonarism lies.

It is to this very bewilderment—and to the haste with which we try to find explanations for it—that I now want to return, revisiting that discussion from 2022. For Silvia Viana, the shock of the first round felt like a nightmare and unleashed an avalanche of interpretations, arriving mainly through social media and WhatsApp groups. Amid the flood of tweets and long-winded online posts, Viana realized that something in that reaction was repetitive, recalling the horror experienced four years earlier, in 2018, when Jair Bolsonaro was elected president.

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Viana observed that, when faced with electoral shock, the progressive vocabulary almost automatically returned to the same words —“civilization,” “democracy,” “progress,” “fascism”—that had structured the reaction four years earlier. For her, the problem was not strictly terminological but political: how much political force those words still retained.[1]

Viana then recalled an incident in 2018, when she was discussing the election with a friend in a bakery. Suddenly, a woman approached them, joined the conversation and, realizing what they were discussing, burst into tears at the prospect of a coup happening again. She was referring not to the more recent removal of Dilma Rousseff through impeachment, but to the military coup of 1964. She feared not only that it might happen again but that this time it would be worse, because its perpetrators would be chosen through elections.

The scene led Viana to insist on a decisive distinction: the far right does not come to power despite elections, but through them; being chosen is fundamental to its legitimacy. The crucial question, therefore, was not simply how to prevent its propaganda, but why such a substantial portion of the population chose—and chose again—this political project. The automatic answer—ignorance, fake news, denialism, lack of education—ended up, she argued, cancelling the very question, because it turned that choice into the mere result of manipulation.[2]

For Viana, exposing the hypocrisy of Bolsonarista discourse at the time made little sense—or, rather, it was ineffective. That was because this “performance,” this indiscriminate use of outright slander, fake news, conspiracy theories, and the most groundless and absurd rumors to attract attention, attack, mobilize and engage voters, was not conducted behind the scenes or in secret. Everything – from US intervention to blatant lying – was done openly, explicitly, even obscenely. For the sociologist, it was a conscious strategy that did not depend on persuasion or convincing people. In that context, whether people actually believed the content they consumed became almost irrelevant.

The point, then, was not to measure how much people genuinely believed such content. For Viana, the disinformation industry had less to do with the ability to lie convincingly than with the ability to mobilize and generate engagement: producing, circulating and sharing content had become forms of participation through which a mass of people could experience itself as the subject of a shared choice and destiny. Behind the fake news, then, lay a deeper truth, so to speak.[3]

***

To make sense of this “truth” expressed by Bolsonarismo, Viana went back to the Covid-19 pandemic, comparing Bolsonaro’s infamous claim that the virus was nothing more than “a little flu” with the “stay home—if you can” refrain that dominated progressive discourse during lockdowns.

For Viana, rather than simply denying the seriousness of the virus, Bolsonaro offered a language of strength through which his admirers could confront it: in the face of a dangerous virus, survival would depend on each person’s ability to stand up to it. This does not mean, of course, that Bolsonaro was not downplaying the gravity of the pandemic or that his declarations had no public-health consequences. It means only that denialist discourse could simultaneously produce a form of identification among people who, because of their social position, had no material possibility of protecting themselves. That language therefore resonated especially with those who remained on the streets, making deliveries, working more for less and having, in fact, to be “strong” enough to face death head-on, day after day.[4]

For Silvia Viana, this psychological consolation was something the “stay home” message could not offer, since it projected an image of privilege: that option simply did not exist for most people. For her, the truth contained in those words, if you can, was this: productive work could not stop. And some workers—precisely the most precarious—could not afford the luxury of staying home.

For Viana, both Bolsonaro’s “everyone is going to die” and the progressive left’s “stay home if you can” shared the same underlying premise: the inescapability of work, even in the face of collapse. The progressive message, however, projected an image of injustice by indicating that those who could stay home would stand a better chance of surviving.

Bolsonarismo had thus managed to offer a perverse image of justice in response to a real experience of inequality: if some people could not protect themselves, then no one should be allowed to; in a world conceived as unavoidably hostile, the strong would survive. The formulation was barbaric, Viana insisted, but it contained an idea of justice whose political intelligibility should not simply be dismissed.[5]

Since Lula’s return to the presidential palace, a question arises: has the progressive left—until recently also represented by the left in government—learned how to deal with this? The recurrence of the “automatic responses” Viana identified in 2022 leads me to think not: progressives are still struggling to face certain truths.

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Commenting on Silvia Viana’s remarks during that same livestream in 2022, philosopher Paulo Arantes agreed with her diagnosis: “Bolsonaro has that support because he tells the truth”, he said, endorsing the sociologist’s hypothesis. More precisely, for him Bolsonarismo articulated at least two great truths: one concerning the present stage of capitalism, which in his view increasingly resembled “barbarism”; and the other, tied to the first, concerning an explicit proposal—however frightening to progressive voters—for how to deal with it (a proposal involving both great sacrifices and certain promises).

Although he rejected simplistic comparisons between Bolsonarismo and fascism—or at least the use of fascism as a label intended to name the horror of Bolsonarismo—Arantes did not abandon an analogy between the Brazilian phenomenon and certain behavioral and historical features of Nazism. Pursuing this analogy, Arantes compared Bolsonarismo’s promise to a politics of plunder: in a world divided into superiors and inferiors, the movement offered its followers not the abolition of that order but the possibility of sharing in its profits and its violence.

Not everyone would need, of course, to gain real access to the spoils. It would be enough to offer them the expectation that, in a world governed by competition between the strong and the weak, they too might someday find themselves in a relatively advantageous position, among the strong. The promise was not to end inequality but to grant each person the right to try to escape it individually. It was in this sense—and not as a straightforward historical repetition—that Arantes conceded some relevance to the analogy with fascism.[6]

For Paulo Arantes, fascism would be the truth of economic liberalism. Hence his harsher formulation: Bolsonarismo tells the truth about a capitalism that already presents itself as barbarism and, instead of promising to overcome it, invites everyone to find their place in the sun within it. Work to the point of exhaustion, survival, entrepreneurship, religious fundamentalism, organized crime and plunder would thus appear not as deviations from a normal order but as constitutive elements of the same decomposing social order.  This, for Arantes, was the tendency of a “post-society” such as Brazil’s. As he put it, “we are no longer a society; we are a monstrous social formation that must be deciphered”[7] (Arantes 2022).

***

The results of this first round of the presidential election suggest to me that the progressive left has failed to decipher this monstrous social formation (or even to deal with it without deciphering it): not even the symbolic enormity—though now aging—of Lula was enough to keep it under control this time.

Yes, because over the past four years, Lula’s third administration increasingly came to resemble a government of damage limitation rather than reconstruction, relying heavily on stopgap measures and, at the political-institutional level, on a bulwark that proved crucial to its very survival: the Supreme Federal Court (STF). After all, it was the Supreme Court, together with the electoral judiciary, that played a central role in ensuring respect for the results of the 2022 election and containing the subsequent attempts to overturn them (after having helped plunge the country into crisis through its role in Lava Jato, we might add).

It was also the Court that ordered arrests, conducted proceedings and convicted participants in the January 8, 2023 attacks, eventually reaching the conviction and imprisonment of Jair Bolsonaro himself and members of his government for their role in the coup plot. It hardly seems an exaggeration, then, to say that an important part of the Lula administration’s political stability depended on these institutions, especially the Supreme Court.

The problem is that this institutional shield now appears increasingly discredited and weakened by allegations that justices were involved in the shady dealings, parties and orgies hosted by banker Daniel Vorcaro. Alexandre de Moraes—Xandão, as he is nicknamed—was for a time embraced and lionized by a significant section of the progressive left, which began seeing him as something of a great savior of Brazilian democracy[Bf7] . But his days on the Court now seem numbered following the far right’s unprecedented victory in the Senate elections. His impeachment, by all indications, is a concrete possibility, regardless of the runoff’s outcome.

Yet it was not only in the “defense of democratic institutions” that the Lula administration’s policy of damage limitation proved insufficient. Its persistence along a path that, at least since Dilma Rousseff, had already shown signs of exhaustion—and, above all, of waning popular appeal—can be understood as another symptom of the mismatch between the government and the aspirations of ordinary people.

The problem can perhaps be seen in the difficulty Lula’s third administration faced in producing policies capable of acquiring the material and symbolic force of the signature achievements of the first Workers’ Party governments, such as Fome Zero (Zero Hunger), Bolsa Família (Family Grant), or even the policy of regular minimum-wage increases. As early as its first hundred days in office, an analysis in Brazil’s paper of record, Folha de S.Paulo, observed that the government was “recycling programs from the past”. Much of the PT’s social policy in this period consisted of restoring, expanding, or rebranding earlier initiatives: Bolsa Família, Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House, My Life), the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), Farmácia Popular (People’s Pharmacy), Mais Médicos (More Doctors), and the policy of raising the minimum wage.

There were important innovations, of course—Pé-de-Meia (a savings incentive for students), Desenrola (a debt-renegotiation program), Crédito do Trabalhador (Worker Credit), Agora Tem Especialistas (Now We Have Specialists), Reforma Casa Brasil (Brazil Home Renovation), and the expansion of the income-tax exemption—but it is telling that nearly all took the form of targeted interventions addressing the symptoms of an increasingly difficult material existence: keeping young people from dropping out of school because they need to work; renegotiating household debt; making credit more accessible; trying to shorten the wait to see a specialist; easing the tax burden on wages; financing renovations to a home that already exists.

These are important policies, some of them quite popular, capable even of producing significant material improvements in millions of lives. The problem, it seems to me, is that together they can scarcely amount to a recognizable horizon of social transformation. They respond to concrete hardships but seem incapable of being articulated into a broader perspective for changing the conditions that generate those very hardships. The future toward which they point seems unable to inspire optimism, a genuine expectation that life will get better. Rather than simply evoking the past, these measures appear insufficient to help people imagine a future that extends much beyond survival, tomorrow, the immediate urgency of hunger, debt, and the bills that never quite add up at the end of the month.

***

Perhaps even more significant than the recycling of old programs is the fact that some of the most popular demands during the administration’s final stretch came, ultimately, from outside the government.

The end of the six-days-on, one-day-off work schedule—known in Brazil as the 6×1 schedule (approved in Parliament on October 14), one of the largest workers’ movements to emerge in Brazil in recent years- was born not of a diagnosis drawn up by some ministry but of workers’ concrete experience, as they began saying for themselves that they could no longer bear living just to work. The demand spread across social media, became a movement, reached Congress and was only then embraced by the government.

It is curious, however, that the debate around the 6×1 schedule should be precisely the labor demand that gained the greatest traction in recent years. Curious because it points to a segment of the population that, despite holding formally registered jobs, never fully enjoyed the “regulated citizenship” that Brazilian laborism had promised since the Vargas era. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the struggle led by the young left wing Rio Congressman Rick Azevedowas more than a labor struggle: it was an anti-slavery struggle, in the sense suggested by the slogan he helped popularize, “Life Beyond Work.”

The banning of online betting platforms, or bets, announced somewhat hastily in the closing stretch of the first-round campaign, followed a different path but likewise responded to opposition that had already reached 78 percent of the population. In both cases, the government appears to have acknowledged a popular demand only after it had already acquired a life of its own.

In the case of betting, however, it is worth asking to what extent the gambling boom might itself be a symptom of a deeper crisis in the world of work: a desperate attempt to break out of the mere cycle of survival, to fantasize about a better future. Brazil’s gambling boom followed the legalization of sports betting and prediction markets in the United States. And, really, who are we to judge? When Faria Lima finance bros (Brazil’s version of Wall Street types), business owners, pastors, judges and politicians also “placed bets,” each in their own way, on Daniel Vorcaro’s schemes, why should we expect impoverished, precarious and often thoroughly resentful people to display a “Protestant ethic” that is conspicuously absent among the elites? In a world divided between hustlers and suckers, who can judge someone who dreams of becoming a hustler one day? After all, insider trading is a hallmark of the same Trump administration that is strongly backing Flávio’s campaign.

***

The impression left by this election is that, confronted with the social and economic tragedy of Jair Bolsonaro’s administration—with its lines of people waiting for discarded bones, the catastrophe of the pandemic, soaring inflation—and then Lula’s triumphant return to power, the PT indulged in the illusion that having Lula back would be enough. There were improvements, yes; there were public policies; there was some redistribution; and there was, without doubt, a great deal of damage limitation.

What seems to have been missing was a sufficiently powerful interpretation of the new forms taken by popular subjectivity amid profound transformations in the world of work. The subject emerging from successive layers of precarity—in both work and life—is no longer quite the same one that the first wave of Lulismo learned to recognize and, to some degree, represent. This is a much more internally divided subject, someone who can be employed and indebted at the same time; whose income may have risen while they still feel poorer; who can consume yet have no time; receive Bolsa Família yet be afraid to leave home; have access to the public health system, SUS, yet wait months to see a specialist; hold a formal job and still discover that six days of every week belong to the boss.

It is no longer simply a matter—if it ever was—of achieving inclusion through employment, wages and consumption. The problem is broader: time, debt, insecurity, exhaustion, housing, the quality of public services and, perhaps above all, a persistent feeling that no matter how hard one works, there is never enough money to make it to the end of the month. Lula’s third administration did identify some of these problems correctly and tried to respond to them. The difficulty, I suspect, was not so much its inability to recognize popular demands as its failure to understand how they were connected within a broader experience of social life and, above all, to turn them into a basis for political organizing. In many cases, the government managed to address concrete needs, but struggled far more to bring those responses together in a recognizable project of social transformation capable of generating a new horizon of expectations.

It is in this sense that the insistence on reviving the signature achievements of the first era of Lulismo may reveal something deeper than a mere lack of administrative creativity. The first Lula era succeeded in organizing its project around a narrative that was relatively easy for people, especially the poor, to grasp: inclusion, employment, rising wages, access to consumption, upward social mobility. Today, however, that no longer seems enough. Popular life emerging from a decade of crisis, austerity, pandemic, platform work, indebtedness and the deterioration of public services no longer fits neatly within that narrative. Perhaps Lula 3’s failure was not simply a failure to deliver. It was also—and perhaps above all—a failure to stop offering answers to questions that the people were already beginning to ask in a different way.

***

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Perhaps, then, it is time to reverse the question once more. Instead of asking why the people failed to understand what the left had to say to them, we should ask why the left understood so little of what the people had been saying.

Joelson Ferreira, a leading figure in the Teia dos Povos (Web of Peoples) [8], put it far more simply in the first year of Lula’s third administration, when I interviewed him for an article I was writing on capitalism and climate change for a collection to be published by Boitempo: “The big problem is that the left has drifted away from grassroots work, from its relationship with the people,” he argued. “One of the big economies out there is the peripheral economy. You go into the neighborhoods and you see all sorts of things flourishing. Everybody’s finding a way to get by, everybody’s looking for some way to survive.”

What Joelson calls the peripheral economy is not simply an economy of scarcity, nor a collection of individual survival strategies. It is also a web of economic and social relations involving informal work, small businesses, mutual-aid networks, the circulation of goods, credit, care and cooperation. These are forms of organization not always recognized as political, but through which much of the life of the popular classes is actually produced and reproduced.

Perhaps one of the keys to deciphering the monstrous social formation lies with these people who “make do”. Because making do does not simply mean having a job: it often means stacking two, three or four jobs, crossing the boundaries between formal employment, odd jobs, informal work and self-employment. It means working far beyond eight hours a day and, once the workday is over, continuing to work just to survive. But it also means engaging in activities beyond paid work itself: caring for others, exchanging things, asking for and giving help, building networks of protection and belonging, improvising ways to reproduce everyday life when wages, credit or public assistance are no longer enough.

It is a form of existence in which work never seems to end and, even then, is almost never enough. It is no way to live. Life beyond work, in this case, can mean twelve or fourteen-hour days making deliveries or driving for a ride-hailing app; selling all manner of goods online; running up credit-card debt; registering as an individual micro-entrepreneur (MEI); borrowing money; caring for other people’s children and one’s own; taking two equally uncomfortable buses or trains across the city and paying dearly for the privilege; attending a church that offers a food basket, a community and some explanation for suffering; betting twenty reais on an online gambling platform, dreaming of getting rich and waking up poorer and deeper in debt; being terrified of getting mugged and losing a phone bought in twenty-four installments. Doing all this and still waking up early the next morning to start all over again, unable to imagine a future reaching much beyond tomorrow—or, with luck, the end of the month.

However astonishing this may sound to a significant part of the progressive left, which despairs at the prospect of democracy’s end, it is in this context that many Brazilians are producing forms of survival, values, attachments, resentments, but also networks of solidarity and ideas of justice. At the limit, perhaps one could say that, for many of these people, the democracy we actually have does not, deep down, make much difference in their lives. Especially insofar as it offers no prospect of a future extending a little beyond the daily struggle simply to survive.

Joelson Ferreira’s critique back in 2023, it is worth saying, was not about “the battle of narratives.” What he was pointing to was that the left, once in government, had moved too far away from the places where people’s everyday lives were actually being organized, materially and symbolically. Speaking of neo-Pentecostal churches that have become such a strong force in Brazil society, for example, he called attention to the fact that they arrive not just with “the word” but with care, food, clothes, belonging and, soon enough, a role—someone can become a church worker, take on a task, acquire a purpose, find a place. Perhaps the problem is that while this world was taking shape, an important part of the left continued to look for the people where it had last left them. And when it could no longer find them there, it concluded, all too quickly, that someone must have deceived them.

Fake news, manipulation, fascism, fundamentalism, resentment... all of these terms name real phenomena. The automatic response, to borrow Silvia Viana’s language, begins when they stop helping us formulate the question and start functioning as ready-made answers.

It is in this sense that the question of populism—which has resurfaced in Brazil every four years, often as a possible way for the left to regain lost ground—needs to be approached from a different perspective. The question is not merely how a leader can discursively produce a people that did not previously exist as such, nor how a disorganized mass can be manipulated through emotions, lies and identifications. This is a question I had already tried to formulate, in other terms, in a 2019 essay about the limits of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of populism. The idea that “the people” are constituted as a political subject through discursive operations of articulation and representation helps explain how heterogeneous demands can acquire a common identity.

But we risk attributing to those operations an almost magical power to produce political organization when, in reality, their effectiveness depends on material conditions and preexisting forms of social life. Empty signifiers do not operate in a vacuum. Before being hailed by the leader, these people are already working, moving about, buying, selling, owing money, praying, caring, killing, dying, desiring, organizing parties, churches, businesses, families, cooperatives, criminal factions and solidarity networks. They are already producing ways of life and interpretations of the world. It is possible that the limit of progressivism today lies in its difficulty in encountering and organizing these people, and in offering them visions of the future and forms of social life that are genuinely more appealing than all those alternatives.

Deciphering the monstrous social formation may therefore require more than finding an adequate name for its monstrosity. Looking at it, Paulo Arantes sees a social fabric in decomposition. But it is important that we also recognize, within the monster, other kinds of social composition. Some may point toward emancipatory ways out; others toward profoundly reactionary arrangements; but most of them may well be ambiguous, contradictory and difficult to classify. Yet it is on this fragmented, confused and often violent terrain that politics begins, long before it becomes an election. Perhaps the crisis of the governing left is, for that very reason, a crisis in its relationship with the popular classes. From this perspective, the result of 2026 would signify not simply an electoral defeat but also the limits of a project of inclusion into citizenship through formal employment and consumption. The very limits of a certain conception of progressivism oriented around a work ethic.

Perhaps this is where one of the greatest difficulties of today’s progressive—or, more precisely, governing—left lies. Recognizing that the life of the popular classes produces its own forms of organization does not mean celebrating them indiscriminately. The same world in which networks of solidarity, cooperatives, community associations and experiences of autonomy flourish also produces churches that exploit faith, predatory businesses, criminal organizations and profoundly authoritarian forms of social life. Many of these experiences coexist, contradictorily, in the same territories, sometimes in the same families, and not infrequently within the same individual. The challenge is not to find, hidden beneath the rubble of the society of work, an authentic, virtuous people waiting to be represented. It is to understand how these ways of life are being produced, what needs they seek to meet, what ideas of justice they carry and what political possibilities they offer.

Perhaps this is why the left’s problem cannot be solved simply by finding a new discourse, a more charismatic leader or a more effective way to compete on social media. Nor would it be enough to revive the signature achievements of the first wave of Lulismo, as though one could thereby reconstruct the social world that gave them meaning.

We must return to the rough-and-tumble grassroots terrain of political organizing, as I argued in a 2019 essay: to the everyday, unglamorous work of building and sustaining collective forms of existence that make life a little less dependent on competition, debt, exhaustion and luck. This does not mean abandoning the struggle for state power or the defense of democratic institutions, but recognizing that their legitimacy can hardly be sustained by the institutions themselves alone. What is at stake, perhaps, is the very possibility of once again offering a tangible experience of the future to those who seem condemned to live only for tomorrow. For if democracy itself cannot produce that experience, we should not be so surprised when, election after election, part of the country seems increasingly willing to bet on the end of the world.